A “normal” week of pastoral ministry

April 8, 2010 David Murray 6 comments

Thanks to Chris Roberts for his follow-up questions to my post on getting the right balance between preparing sermons and pastoral visitation.

I think the best way I can answer is to describe a “normal” pastoral week for me. Obviously “normal” can quickly become abnormal if you have a death in your congregation. And what was “normal” for me in my situation may not suit you in your situation. In my last congregation I had about 130 homes (some families, some couples, some individuals) to visit. About 75% of them were located in the small town of Stornoway, where I also lived, with the rest scattered in very rural communities north, south, east and west of the town. The furthest home was about an hour away. While the congregation had a good mix of ages, there were probably more elderly people than a “normal” city congregation due to many island folks being drawn back there for retirement, and many students having to leave to study on the mainland.

1. My target was to visit every home in the congregation at least once a year. Allowing for vacations, special church meetings, funerals, etc, I reckoned I would have about 40 “normal” weeks in the year, which meant at least three pastoral visits a week.

2. In addition to annual pastoral visits to every home in the congregation, there were five other types of visit.

a. The sick in hospital. I tried to visit both before and after operations, as well as a visit when the person returned home. I usually spent no more than 20 minutes with a sick person.

b. The elderly in their own homes. I had a number of seniors who were not well enough to come out to church, but were still living in their own homes. I would try to visit them once a quarter (which was never enough!). Visiting time between 30-60 minutes.

c. The elderly in nursing homes. I would also try to visit them every quarter. However, as they were surrounded by other people and tended to see more visitors, I would tend to visit the elderly in their own homes more than this group. Visiting time 30-45 minutes.

d. The emergencies. “Stuff happens,” and so maybe once or twice a month I would have to make unplanned visits to homes with problems or special needs. Visiting time up to 2 hours.

e. Non-church-goers. In the course of living in a small town and visiting other homes, I would often come across people who were not going to church anywhere, and so I would ask them if they wanted a pastoral visit. Maybe 25-40% said yes. Sometimes that resulted in people coming to church. Usually not. Visiting time about 1 hour.

So, adding it all up, I probably did about 10-12 visits a week.

3. Every Saturday I would decide which homes to visit the following week, based on need and geographical proximity. I tried to visit homes that were close together to minimize driving time between visits. I usually arranged the day and time of the visit at church on the Sunday.

4. If a person or couple could be visited in the afternoon, that’s when I would visit. That left my evening visiting times for those who were working through the day.

5. I usually set apart Wednesday to do most of my visits. Why Wednesday? Let me set out my week to explain

Monday. On Monday, after Sunday’s exertions, I was good for nothing. From the beginning of my ministry my wife “forced” me to take Mondays off with her and our family (who are home-schooled). I’m glad she did, because the Pastor needs a “sabbath” too. I think there were only two times in my ministry when I decided to work on Mondays, and by the end of the week I regretted it, as I ground to an inefficient halt (but that’s another blog post).

Tuesday. Fully rested, on Tuesday I was raring to go again. However, as visiting exhausts me, and I did not want to run down my gas before the week even started, I usually did not visit on a Tuesday. Instead I worked on reading, writing, and lecture projects on Tuesday morning, catching up on administration and phone calls in the afternoon. Evening spent with my wife and family.

Wednesday. After a few hours in the study, I would usually leave the house about 11am to begin my visiting. I would begin with visits to the elderly at home and in nursing homes. After lunch on the go, I would then do some hospital visits (not in the morning because nurses and doctors are usually busy with patients then). By mid-afternoon I was on to my annual pastoral visits of those who were at home in the afternoon. After returning home for a quick evening meal, I would then be out again for the first of two evening visits (usually two of the annual pastoral visits). I would schedule these for 7 pm and 8.30 pm. Initially I tried to squeeze three in, but with traveling time between visits, that meant I was sometimes in a home for less than an hour. I found 90 minute visits to be the best length of time. Any longer and conversation would become more social than pastoral. Obviously if any major issue came up, then I would promise to return. Most of my congregation knew that I was on a tight visiting schedule and so they did not really expect visits to last the whole evening. I also found that if people knew you had another visit planned, it was easier to end the visit on time. I usually returned home before 10.30pm.

Thursday. I’ve worked on building sites in Eastern Europe in sub-zero temperatures, and yet I found pastoral visitation far more draining! So on Thursday I would usually take an extra hour or so in bed, before getting into the study to prepare my message for the midweek prayer meeting and Bible Study. That would take me 4-5 hours. Late afternoon I would catch up on administration, and maybe begin “looking for a text” for my two Sunday sermons. Evening at the midweek meeting, often followed by a deacons or elders meeting, or maybe a counseling visit.

Friday. Day in the study preparing for Sunday sermons. Often I would have to go out late Friday afternoon to visit someone who had taken ill since Wednesday. As I had not spent an evening with my wife since Tuesday, and as Saturday and Sunday evenings were taken up with preparation and preaching, I would usually reserve Friday evening for her and my family.

Saturday. Preparing for Sunday sermons. I usually tried to be finished sermon prep by late Saturday afternoon so that I could go for a long walk on the beach to loosen up study-tightened body, listen to some sermons from Sermon Audio on the texts I was going to preach on, read a bit, go over my sermon, etc. I would never visit on a Saturday unless it was a real emergency.

Sunday. VERY BUSY. No visits unless ultra-emergency. All energies devoted to preaching the Word.

Concluding thoughts

1. Again, please do not take me as a norm. As I look back, I think I should have visited more. On the other hand, I do feel my preaching and family life would have suffered if I had. You need to find the right balance for you and your situation.

2. I had a great team of 10 elders and 12 deacons who also visited their designated areas regularly. That took a lot of pressure off me.

3. Start as you wish to continue. Don’t start with three hour visits or people will be disappointed if you only visit for two hours the next time. Let your congregation know that they can expect at least one visit a year. My first congregation was much smaller (about 30 homes) and I tried to visit them twice a year.

4. Pray before you go, as you go, and after you go. Pray especially that the Lord would give you His loving shepherd’s heart. We do not want to be doing pastoral visits in a legalistic, Mormon-like spirit.

5. Get organized. Make sure that you keep a record of your visits so that you don’t miss anyone, and so that you can defend yourself if a forgetful elderly person says to the elders “He never visits me!” (it will happen). Also, although I started each year with the mountain of 130 homes to visit, if I was “ticking off” 3+ homes a week, I could relax knowing that I would get to the top of the hill eventually.

6. Ask parents to make sure that their children will be present for the visit.

7. A death in the congregation will throw your schedule out for week or more (I’ll return to that another time).

8. Remember your wife and family. The ministry can devour all your time…and your family. If you let it.

Successful ministry or happy marriage?

April 7, 2010 David Murray 0 comments

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? (David Brooks, The Sandra Bullock Trade, New York Times, 03/29/10)

Let’s take David Brooks’ deal, and re-frame it for pastors: Would you accept a “successful” ministry at the cost of a happy marriage?

On the basis of extensive and rigorous research studies, Brooks argues:

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

Brooks also has a fascinating few paragraphs on the relationship between money and happiness. For example, did you know that:

People aren’t happiest during the years when they are winning the most promotions. Instead, people are happy in their 20’s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.

But he returns to the relationship between personal relationships and happiness, and concludes:

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

Back to the deal: Would you accept a “successful” ministry at the cost of a happy marriage?

If someone was to look at your daily schedule, would they know your answer to that question?

Picture: 2006 © Fred Goldstein. Image from BigStockPhoto.com

Preach or Pastor?

April 6, 2010 David Murray 4 comments

Preaching or pastoring? That’s the choice that many pastors make at the beginning of their ministries, and also each day of their ministries. Will my life-focus, or daily-focus, be on preaching or on visiting the flock? Will I concentrate on preaching better sermons, or getting to know my sheep better?

Of course, it’s a bit of a false choice, as we pastor the flock by preaching, and our preaching is (should be) heavily influenced by our pastoral visitation. Nevertheless, I have noticed that most pastors, often sub-consciously, have answered that question one way or another. And most congregations will be able to tell you which way their pastor has answered that question: “He’s a great preacher, but we never see him,” or, “He can’t preach, but he’s a wonderful pastor.” And sometimes, especially here in the USA, the congregation will make that choice for a minister, employing him as a “Teaching Pastor,” with little or no expectation of any pastoral visitation.

I realized early in my ministry that my inclination, my default, was to focus on preaching. Sometimes, in the early days, I did neglect visitation. And if I did, it always, eventually, had a negative impact on my preaching. I was greatly helped by my wife who had been raised in the home of a faithful Pastor. She knew what a Pastor’s weekly schedule should look like, with a wise balance between visiting the sheep and preparing their food. If she felt I was becoming imbalanced, she would (gently, usually) tell me.

The need to find this balance has also been brought home to me in my Seminary work. With so many new courses to write, the temptation is to shut myself away every hour of the day and week to concentrate on preparing “perfect” lectures. However, does that produce well-taught students? Probably not. As this article on MIT’s Tomorrow’s Professor Blog demonstrates, “displaying a personal interest in students is not only effective as a way to encourage participation and engagement, but is necessary for real learning.”

Substituting sheep for students, pastors for instructors, and church for college, note some of the other findings:

Research in neuroscience and the physiology of learning demonstrates the strong link between emotion and cognition.
In the absence of the strong, positive emotions engendered by caring, deep engagement, motivation, and interest, little real learning occurs.
Research on large classes demonstrates the positive effects of personalizing the large class with respect to enhancing student attendance and motivation to learn.
Undergraduate students repeatedly mention the importance of one-to-one interaction with instructors in supervised projects and the closer interactions with other students and instructors in small classes as important factors in their learning.
These threads point to the importance of engagement and a sense of community as critical to college success.

Does that help you re-answer the “Preach or Pastor?” question.

Failure: the last taboo?

April 5, 2010 David Murray 6 comments

“Taboo” comes from the Tongan language, and originally had religious connotations. In the West, it has come to mean “a social prohibition or ban relating to any area of human speech or activity.” Over the last 50 years we have seen most previously taboo subjects and actions “normalized.”

But one great taboo remains in America. Failure. Until the recession. In 12 months, more than 4 million workers lost their jobs. On a single day in January 2009, 70,000 people were laid off, and another 50,000 or 60,000 lost their jobs on each of the 10 days that followed. Most of these people were hard-working, reliable, and conscientious – usually guarantees of success in America. And yet most of these 4 million had to endure a deep sense of personal failure, which affected not just their bank balance, but their marriages, their health, and often their relationship with God. Failure is no longer taboo in suburban America.

But is that a bad thing? Even secular and humanistic thinkers are viewing failure more positively. Psychology Today ran a series last year called The Failure Interview Series.

Philip Schultz wanted to be a writer. But he was in the “dummy” class, hated to write, and only learned to read when he was 11. When he spoke in school about his writing ambitions, the teacher laughed. Schultz grew up with a deep and daily sense of failure, until he took that ugly lump of unwanted clay and started molding his reflection on failure into a lucrative writing career.

In 2008 Schultz won the Pulitzer prize for a collection of his poems. The title: Failure. The cover: a bent nail in a board. Since then, many have spoken to him of the catharsis of being freed to admit failure, and to talk about their relationship with failure.

Apple founder Steve Jobs ascribes his present success to reevaluating his life after three setbacks: dropping out of college, being fired from the company he founded, and being diagnosed with cancer.

J.K. Rowling lost her marriage, parental approval and most of her money. But then, with nothing left to lose, she turned to her first love – writing. “Failure stripped away everything inessential,” she said. “It taught me things about myself I could have learned no other way.”

Michael Jordan said: “I have failed over and over and over again, and that is why I succeed.”

The American chess master Bruce Pandolfini, who trains many young chess players, said: “At the beginning, you lose – a lot. The kids who are going to succeed are the ones who learn to stand it. A lot of young players find losing so devastating they never adapt, never learn to metabolize that failure and to not take it personally. But good players lose and then put the game behind them emotionally.”

Learning to fail well

Learning to “fail well” is a vital part of Christian ministry. A pastor said to me recently, “The first ten years of ministry is all about being broken and stripped!” I must have had a crash course, because it took me only five years to be broken, stripped, and branded a failure! These were dark, dark days. Yet, I know that my 10 months in the school of failure gave me my most valuable degree – a Master’s in how to fail well. Sadly, I keep forgetting what I learned and have to keep going back to that unpopular school for refresher courses.

If we have learned to fail well, we will have realistic expectations of ourselves and our ministries. We will not soar too high on success, and we will not sink too deeply upon a setback. We will not resent or envy the “success” of others. Nor will we get caught up in trying to imitate them. In fact we might worry for them, and want to pray especially for them.

And we take all our failures to our unfailing Lord for His full and free forgiveness. We take our failed evangelism, our failed sermons, our failed pastoral visits, and our failed counseling to the Lord, and pour out our hearts to Him: “Lord, I’ve messed up another sermon…I’ve forgotten to visit that needy soul…I was too scared to speak about you to my fellow-passenger…I’ve misjudged the mood of my elders…I’ve unnecessarily offended that family who left…I was insensitive in counseling…I’m paying for breaking a confidence…”

But as we confess our failures, we experience the Lord’s unchanging and unconditional love. And we re-emerge…humbler and weaker, but wiser and happier too. And eventually we see how God can transform our ugly failures into something profitable and even beautiful.

Failure should not be the last taboo in the ministry. Sometimes it’s failure that makes a ministry.

80 Ways to Redeem Time

April 3, 2010 David Murray 1 comment

“Redeeming the times for the days are evil” (Eph. 5:16).

How would you like a job title like Creativity Sparker! That’s what Glen Stansberry is. Here he lists 80 ways to add productive time to our days.

The ones I’ve found most effective in my own life are:

“Exercise – It sounds counter-intuitive. You have to spend time exercising. But, research has shown that exercise boosts cognitive function, creativity, problem solving and productivity. In fact a NASA study showed employees who exercised daily worked at 100% efficiency after 7 hours, while those who didn’t saw a 50% drop, meaning it took them twice as long to accomplish the same thing. So, exercise, in effect, creates time.”

“Batch & Focus – Multitasking kills time. Again, sounds counter-intuitive. But, every time you switch your attention, there’s a cognitive ramp up time. It can range from a few seconds to a few minutes. So, if you constantly cycle between checking email, IM, twitter, texts, voicemail, calendars, blackberries, apps, scores, stock quotes, news, current projects and more, then respond to each, the time you lose to incessant ramp-up becomes substantial. Instead, minimize time lost to nonstop cognitive ramping by batching your time and focusing on individual categories of tasks with intense, yet discrete bursts of attention.”

“During the day, I add extra time to my day by establishing ‘no interruption’ periods. During these periods, I focus my complete attention on specific activities without allowing myself to be interrupted by anything or anyone. This allows me to work faster, smarter, and it eventually leaves me more time to answer email, compose tweets, and make phone calls.”

“I use a timer to limit the amount of time I spend on daily tasks such as ‘inbox zero’, ‘snail mail zero’, cranking through my lists, etc. This keeps me from getting distracted from what’s really important during my day.”

“It has been said before, but I’ll put it out there again—close email, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for big chunks of your work day.”

Food and mood.

April 2, 2010 David Murray 1 comment

Christians have rightly stressed that the state of the soul (the heart) affects the mind and the emotions, which then influences behavior. One important motivation behind this stress is to assert human responsibility and avoid always blaming external factors for our problems.

However, we must be careful not to avoid one extreme (it’s all physical and external) by running to another extreme (it’s all spiritual and internal).

In a recent interview, the best-selling author A. J. Jacobs explained in popular language, how much our physical state impacts our emotions.

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa?
I’m continually surprised at how much my physical state affects my emotions. I used to think the ghost and the machine were separate. But they’re so intertwined. Lack of sleep can really darken your worldview. Even being cold puts me in a worse mood. Did you read that study about how people are more positive when they’re holding a warm cup of coffee? We can’t escape our bodies.

I wish more pastors would recognize this (body/soul) dynamic, both for themselves and for those they counsel. Take, for example, the recent book Feelings and Faith by Brian Borgman. Although the book starts and finishes with a defense of an ancient error – that God the Father suffers pain and sorrow – the book is one of the best Christian treatments of emotion that I have read. There are many valuable insights into the bible and human nature – especially the connections between the mind and the emotions. It is Christ-centered and practical. I especially welcomed Borgman’s balanced and careful discussion of depression.

In the introduction, however, Borgman sets up a false antithesis:

Historically there are two views on the emotions: one sees the emotions as unrelated to the mind or thinking. The other sees the emotions directly related to the mind or thinking (page 25).

Borgman says the first view is the evolutionary perspective; it teaches that we are subject to our emotions, and so absolves us of responsibility; and as such, it is “biblically unacceptable.”

He then contrasts this with the biblical view (as he sees it):

The emotions are not simply impulses; they are the indicators of what we value and what we believe….The emotions reflect and express the inner man, the heart, the soul, the mind (page 26).

Borgman’s concludes with a theological definition of emotion:

The emotions are an inherent part of what it means to be a person; they express the values and evaluations of a person and influence motives and conduct (page 26).

These last two quotations are true, but they are not the whole truth.

Emotions can also be affected by exhaustion, diabetic hypos, exercise, hormonal changes, gland disorders, brain injuries, high blood pressure, and even sunshine. There is also a large amount of research showing the impact of food on our mood (as if we did not know that by experience!). You might want to start reading here or here. When counseling depressed people, we should probably ask them about their diet, and perhaps suggest that they consult a nutritionist, as part of the counseling process.

Of course we are still responsible for how we react to physical tiredness, diabetic hypos, hormonal changes, adrenal gland malfunctions, brain injuries, etc. And of course the physical may only be part of a larger problem. But let’s not make the mistake of ignoring, minimizing, or denying the impact of the body on the emotions, or the physical on the spiritual.